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Recently, Mat Dickie boarded a train out of London and came across a kid, face-down in a smartphone game, sitting in Dickie's ticketed seat. As the furious tapping played out in front of him, Dickie contemplated whether he should hassle this transit gamer or just find an empty spot elsewhere. The solution ultimately revealed itself when the developer got close enough to catch a glimpse of the boy's screen: Wrestling Revolution 3D.

By now, the sports simulator gaming genre is as tried and true as sports itself. The Football Managerfranchise has been delighting international audiences for 25 years-plus, nudging even stateside developers to take notice within the last decade (how else do you explain Madden spin-off, NFL Head Coach, sneaking into a release cycle full of familiar 2K titles?). But Wrestling Revolution 3D holds an unusual position within this landscape—it's the genre's most unexpected yet successful mobile title.

In 2017, Wrestling Revolution 3D became the first sports sim to surpass 50 million downloads. Today, the Google Play Store lists it in the "50,000,000 to 100,000,000" download category. Officially licensed games from the UFC and WWE, for comparison, stall at around 10 million downloads. Dickie knows all this because he's not only a fan—he's a long-time independent developer better known as MDickie. Wrestling Revolution 3D is his most successful game to date.

"I didn’t know whether to throw him off the train or pat him on the back,” Dickie jokes.

Looking at Wrestling Revolution 3D, you'd never guess its historic level of success or pervasiveness. The graphics are blocky and dated compared to modern sports simulators. It doesn't enjoy a professional-league licensing deal, so the characters are all weird knock-offs ("Nightshift" and not The Undertaker; "Jimi Sierra" and not John Cena; "Hank Slogan" and... you get it). And the gameplay, well... it may enjoy some level of fandom because of just how objectively bad it is.

For many, MDickie may be to video games what The Room's Tommy Wiseau is to film. Allow an August 2017 play-through from gaming site Giant Bomb—in which players call the experience "hell on Earth"—to partially explain.

Search YouTube and you'll find plenty of MDickie-inspired stream videos like this (for virtually any of his games).

"This game is 39 megs, and I feel like [Dickie] is in on it—I think he knows these games are kind of bad," host Dan Ryckert says in the introduction.

"I've been hearing about the MDickie stuff for years... the thing people always talk about are the customization elements," co-host Alex Navarro says. (In fairness, the duo soon scrolls through a seemingly endless amount of character selections and match customization options.) "But it's the part where you play them that people seem a little less hot on."

Ryckert goes on to call the game "goofy as shit" and "janky and broken, but in a way I find very funny. I may get more enjoyment out of this than I do the 2K games."

Navarro compares the experience to playing with '90s action figures. "The kind of way you'd wrestle with them is to make all the moves at 2/3rd speed and you'd have to laboriously flip them to make the wrestlers do the moves," he says. "That's what this looks like—it looks like someone playing with action figures that are as stiff as early '90s action figures. There's no reason they should have to move at this speed, but they do."

So to carry the Wiseau analogy through, by some accounts Dickie has singlehandedly made some of the best worst video games in history. But unlike Wiseau—who made one singularly bad film and only later built something resembling a side gig from it—Dickie has enjoyed a nearly 20-year career independently creating a range of surprisingly deep, accomplished, and janky video games by himself.

Wrestling Revolution 3D may represent something of a commercial and statistical breakthrough, but it's merely the latest chapter in Dickie's story of perseverance and peculiarity. And throughout it all, the developer has stayed true to himself while the whole industry changed right alongside.

stunt.zip

Born in the early '80s, Dickie grew up in the height of the console era. Accordingly, he wanted to be a game developer ever since he was a child, sketching out ideas for games with their own internal logic. And this looked like a fairly realistic goal for a young boy at the time. The history of video games before the late 1990s/early 2000s megaboom is characterized by committed amateurs and solitary enthusiasts making games in their bedrooms. Even video games like PONG were, in reality, small productions coded by a single person or a handful of collaborators. Many of the console games in the first 1980s gaming boom were produced by hobbyist gamers who simply managed to sell their work to a distributor.

In 2000, when he was a mere teenager, Dickie publicly released his first game. It was a 450-kilobyte .zip file named stunt.zip; the game itself was called Hardy Boyz Stunt Challenge. It allowed players to take on the role of one of the two Hardy Boyz, professional wrestlers for the then-WWF who had a penchant for jumping off high places, like the tops of ladders or bleachers in sports arenas. Players essentially gained points for the complexity of the stunts they performed.

Starting with Hardy Boyz Stunt Challenge, wrestling would be fertile ground for MDickie.

It took Dickie two weeks to make the game after he walked through his local branch of Woolworths and spotted a package on the software shelves called Div Games Studios. Created by a Spanish company, Div was a programming language kind-of sort-of like C that was born during the days of MS-DOS gaming.

"It promised to make game development easy," Dickie tells Ars. "I picked it up, took it home, and spent the summer of 2000 teaching myself how to use it from the examples."

The 17-year-old was studying computing at college at the time. So after just a couple weeks, he managed to build the basic mechanics of the game: jump off as high a point as possible, do some crazy stuff, earn points. He was more-or-less satisfied with his work, so he got in touch with a wrestling website called Tha Warzone that he used to frequent. “I said, ‘I’ve made a game about wrestling; it’s quite topical. Why don’t you throw it up on your website and let people download it?’”

The owner of the site agreed to do so, and around 15,000 people downloaded the game. “The feedback was really positive,” says Dickie. “I was getting fan mail saying, ‘Can we have more of this?’ That gave me the impetus to make more.”

Dickie soon wrote down an affirmation he'd cribbed from his childhood hero, Bruce Lee (words from the martial arts' legend still greet visitors to Dickie's website). At an early age, Lee had written down that, in 10 years’ time, he’d be the highest-paid movie star in Hong Kong—and, lo and behold, he ended up doing just that. Dickie’s affirmation was a little different and multifaceted.

“I want to make games for a living. I want to run my own wrestling company,” Dickie recalls. “Be rich. Travel the world.”

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74 Reader Comments

I'm not sure why I read that to be honest. I guess it resolves the question that things are not fair in this strange life, or maybe they are but everything seems confusing these days.

This guy makes bad games. Not good games. These games are things I would never touch. And he's rich I guess. So we are celebrating the mediocrity of creation skills because he's popular on Android. I think it would be decent enough to question just how deranged and useless our societies have become.

I mean, how many super special guys code and do art for games that are top of the line masterpieces? We don't seem to celebrate those people a lot. In fact, a lot of gamers probably don't even watch the credits. Games are so complex now, it's hard to imagine there are stories just like this behind them.

But instead the guy that makes shitty games gets the story. It is what it is. It was a nicely written piece. Useless I guess. But it's there.

I'm not sure why I read that to be honest. I guess it resolves the question that things are not fair in this strange life, or maybe they are but everything seems confusing these days.

This guy makes bad games. Not good games. These games are things I would never touch. And he's rich I guess. So we are celebrating the mediocrity of creation skills because he's popular on Android. I think it would be decent enough to question just how deranged and useless our societies have become.

I mean, how many super special guys code and do art for games that are top of the line masterpieces? We don't seem to celebrate those people a lot. In fact, a lot of gamers probably don't even watch the credits. Games are so complex now, it's hard to imagine there are stories just like this behind them.

But instead the guy that makes shitty games gets the story. It is what it is. It was a nicely written piece. Useless I guess. But it's there.

I think one of the subpoints of the article is "can 50 million players be wrong?"

You say "he makes bad games." Are they? Or does he get something that some of the real "mediocre" houses just don't get? It's spelled out in the article:

Quote:

“I don’t think you can be around for 17 years and be dismissed as a failure, as some people say I am,” he explains, taking a shot at the unkind reviews some of his games receive from wiseacres online. “But the criticism I find frustrating more than hurtful. I think there’s an intelligent conversation to be had about the pros and cons of how I make games, but nobody wants to have the intelligent conversation about that. They just want to say, ‘This is shit; he’s a c*nt.’”

and

Quote:

He insists "fun comes first and gameplay is on point" with each title, and considering his work over time supports that ethos.

I think he "gets it" much better than 90% of game publishers out there.

I'm not sure why I read that to be honest. I guess it resolves the question that things are not fair in this strange life, or maybe they are but everything seems confusing these days.

This guy makes bad games. Not good games. These games are things I would never touch. And he's rich I guess. So we are celebrating the mediocrity of creation skills because he's popular on Android. I think it would be decent enough to question just how deranged and useless our societies have become.

I mean, how many super special guys code and do art for games that are top of the line masterpieces? We don't seem to celebrate those people a lot. In fact, a lot of gamers probably don't even watch the credits. Games are so complex now, it's hard to imagine there are stories just like this behind them.

But instead the guy that makes shitty games gets the story. It is what it is. It was a nicely written piece. Useless I guess. But it's there.

I'm not sure why I read your post, to be honest. You left your opinion in a steaming pile at the top of the comment chain, while freely admitting you don't even know what the games are. You are judging a game you never played, and condemning it because it doesn't fit your tastes. Then you go on to complain about how "we" don't seem to celebrate the people who create the code that does fit your taste. Well, that's not what this is about, people like fun things and if you want to have a discussion on the merits of a game, play the thing first and have some actual specific complaints. If you don't, your post just comes across as "It's shit, he's a c*nt."

I like the story. Dickie seems like a decent chap, and I really feel like our industry needs a lot more decent people.

I've grown up in software development, and as the industry has matured and expanded, it's become kind of an "ethical wasteland." Folks don't care about what they do; they just want to drive a Tesla and own a penthouse crib in the Mission.

Companies deliberately write garbage code, on the theory that they will be brought out and their garbage code will be trashed.

It's rather discouraging, TBPO. When I was young, I used to think that the world would be a better place if young folks ran it, as we were passionate and idealistic. I thought older folks were cynical and evil.

Now that the entire software development industry has been run for a while by folks under 40, I no longer have that opinion. I have seen some very, very depressing ethos demonstrated by the folks that I thought would "save the world."

His games aren't bad; they just don't have high-end graphics and production value. He likes what he does, he likes the people he serves with his software, and they seem to like him back.

Now that I'm out "the other side" of my career, I have a comfortable retirement set, basically by spending a couple of decades having my work destroyed in front of me by folks with no feel for what they do, and with no respect for their users. It's time for me to do stuff that I want to do.

I won't be able to make high-production-value applications, and I look forward to being sneered at by "buzzword-compliant" dorks, but what I make will work well, and will serve its users well.

In fact, I'm looking at ways to lower my rates, so that NPOs can access software at the level I can deliver.

It was said in different words above but I'll repeat it: Games are meant to be enjoyed. Call it escapism. Call it killing time. Call it community. Call it entertainment. Games go by many names, and they mean different things to different people, but the primary function of a game is for it to be enjoyed, whatever the reason. If 50 million people downloaded and enjoyed the game, even if only briefly, then it served its purpose, and this man is indeed vindicated.

I'm not sure why I read that to be honest. I guess it resolves the question that things are not fair in this strange life, or maybe they are but everything seems confusing these days.

This guy makes bad games. Not good games. These games are things I would never touch. And he's rich I guess. So we are celebrating the mediocrity of creation skills because he's popular on Android. I think it would be decent enough to question just how deranged and useless our societies have become.

I mean, how many super special guys code and do art for games that are top of the line masterpieces? We don't seem to celebrate those people a lot. In fact, a lot of gamers probably don't even watch the credits. Games are so complex now, it's hard to imagine there are stories just like this behind them.

But instead the guy that makes shitty games gets the story. It is what it is. It was a nicely written piece. Useless I guess. But it's there.

Most AAA studios don't have a story like this. I won't buy this dude's game but I appreciate his story.

I had never heard of MDickie before reading this article, so I tried out Wrestling Revolution 3D.

It would be fair to say it didn't click with me; I didn't find it particularly fun. But what did strike me is how the whole experience from the release notes (yes, really) to the loading screen to the tutorial oozed personality. You can tell the guy that wrote it put a lot of effort in, and if your idea of fun is the same as his, you're going to love it.

I see some strong parallels with B-movies, apart from Wiseau. I have a certain fondness for shitty B-movies, especially italian horror movies, and while, on any sane technical level, these movies are BAD (save for some charming miniatures), they are fascinating and chariming in ways that modern big budget hollywood movies are not.

It's heartening to see someone making a living by following their passion. Though I've never played any of Dickie's games I can understand the draw of something slightly dopey. I still play Rise of the Triad.

Sightly related information that may be interesting for some:The company that made DIV Games Studio eventually closed doors. Fans of the language started an open source project called Fenix to develop a compatible compiler and interpreter. Fenix later became BennuGD and, while not exactly modern (it runs on SDL1.2) or being actively developed it still receives bug fixes and care by its community. It's a quite cool tool for doing retro style games and I recommend people to check it out. One cool thing is that it has ports for machines like the GPH Linux handhelds and the Wii, among others.Also, few years ago the original author of DIV released the original source code of DIV (through another guy who used to run a DIV fan site actually) as DIV DX. I know less about this one, I recall it is a bit less advanced than BennuGD but has an IDE much like the original DIV (it included stuff like a graphics editor, sound player, debugger and such all inside an app).Finally there is an online html5 implementation called DivGO. The cool thing about this one is that you can code straight in the browser.

What I think this demonstrates is that games come down to one measure: do I have fun?

At the end of the day this is what video games are about.Sure you can have fun with a highly stylized game that is all flash, with no decent story and barely working mechanics. A game can look pretty and you can have seeing it through by playing it.Sure you can have fun with a highly complex game with intricate mechanics that have zero plot and zero visuals. Understanding and using the mechanics to your advantage can be fun and people enjoy figuring those things out.Sure you can have fun with a game with an amazing story with poor mechanics and half backed graphics. People still read books, and by throwing some interaction and visuals give a lot more enjoyment from it.I still play Dwarf Fortress because I love the mechanics and working with the in game world to make it work for me despite the lack of any story and the hard to read visuals. I'm currently going through my yearly playthrough of both KotpRs cause I love their stories despite their aged look and easily abused mechanics.

The only game of Mdickie I played was The You Testament and I had a lot of fun with it. The simple visuals, the quirky nonsensical story, and the broken mechanics. In those three categories most people rate games, it didn't do really well. But when put together the game was quirky and fun to play, and I did have fun despite it being an objectively bad game. I've never told anyone it's a great or even good game, but I've recommended playing it to quite a lot of people.

I love these stories. Dickie makes the games he wants, people enjoy them, and he makes a living doing it! Makes me want to check out his games.I wish him well and hope he can continue to be successful.

He sounds kind of like Sean Cooper of Boxhead Wars fame. Cooper created the first game kind of on a dare. He had been a game dev at EA and got tired of the constant pressure for graphics over game play. So he created a free game that used not much better than stick figures, boxes. But the game had fantastic game play. I know I spent waay too many hours playing the various versions.

I honestly had never heard of MDickie, but like most of you have said, my metric is "is it fun?".That can be either graphically awesome games, like the first time playing Descent: (*puts on nostalgia glasses *) 6 degrees of freedom!, 3D maps!, Spaceships & mines!. Taking your first flight in Elite: Dangerous or even enjoying the hair motion on Lara's ponytail (in PC).

Or it can be as simple as a game that powers up logic gates (and,not,xor,...) in as few steps as possible, or (please forgive me) playing a Candy Crush clone while waiting for something (usually before phone meetings start)

...Companies deliberately write garbage code, on the theory that they will be brought out and their garbage code will be trashed.

It's rather discouraging, TBPO. When I was young, I used to think that the world would be a better place if young folks ran it, as we were passionate and idealistic. I thought older folks were cynical and evil.

Eh... what's TBPO? To be fair, the bigger problem here is that:

<RANT>People are trained as "code monkeys" instead of "software engineers". Learning to code is good and I'm all for it, but learning to code DOES NOT equal learning to develop software. At least no more than obtaining a driver's licence qualifies you to be a rally driver (think WRC).</RANT>

Also, as much as you sometimes want to properly fix something when you have your boss, the boss's boss and the Director/VP almost sitting next to you saying "Doom & Gloom awaits you unless you finish in 3mins"... You can't always win that battle.

EDIT: Grammar/spelling (you'd think my grammar would improve after writing ~500 pages of test/documents in the last month, but alas)

Wow, I'll take "Things I knew of and never expected to be on Ars" for 500 Alex.

I knew of his games, knew they were bad both objectively and subjectively in some manner, excellent in others. I'm quite happy I got to hear his story, man has far more resolve and vision then I ever will.

The quote attributed to Alex Navarro after the embedded Giant Bomb video is actually said by Dan Ryckert.

Hey McNugget, which quote in particular (or are they all mid-ID'd/swapped)? Went back to re-listen and it seems like they're consistent (in a Voice 1 has these snippets, Voice 2 has other ones sort of way), but I admittedly don't listen regularly and it'd be easy to mixup with the speed of their banter. (I know CSW can gladly double-check me, but is afk at the moment.)

I clicked on the article expecting to hate this guy. To my surprise, I actually like him. Heck, I'll probably start rooting for Dickie. Putting things into perspective, he gives people what they want as opposed to telling people what they should want. Taking a look at myself, I realize the most played game in my life is a cheesy "button masher" on my phone. It's free, doesn't slam you with ads every 20 seconds, and can be played without IAP. The graphics are mediocre, audio is very basic, it's ridiculously easy, and repetitive as hell. Despite all that, the developer keeps it updated with new content, is responsive to bug reports, and takes in user feedback. It's something I can fire up for 10 minutes here and there to kill some time and destress.

Wow, I'll take "Things I knew of and never expected to be on Ars" for 500 Alex.

I knew of his games, knew they were bad both objectively and subjectively in some manner, excellent in others. I'm quite happy I got to hear his story, man has far more resolve and vision then I ever will.

Kudos to you MDickie.

Honestly, Hard Time wasn't even that bad of a game. Rough around the edges and a little buggy, but no more so than the average Bethesda release. I get the feeling a lot of "so bad it's good" talk comes from MDickie's lack of conformity to the usual indie dev dogma (pixelart is god, 2D platformer or bust, etc) when his games are pretty mechanically sound.

But yeah, it's impressive that he's stuck with it this long as a true independent. Most other developers would have either gotten absorbed by a larger publisher or just quit to make business software.

Doesn't seem like a bad dude. The games may be jank, but he infuses them with heart and soul, something you'd see much more often back in the 90's PC scene, which lines up with his pedigree.

That's part of what appeals people to indie games. Triple-A, even when a good polished game, may have subtle flavors noticed beneath the top of your head, that are more artificial, lifeless, sterile, especially in these days of hyperacceptability. Part of a game's appeal isn't just successfully walking a sporting path, but that it's been laid down by a human. Sometimes you feel a connection, even from a long-gone developer, you see what they lovingly set up with the sole intention of communicating to you, and you say "yup, I see what you were saying-without-words". There's navel-gazing youtubes out there that will go on about how clever classic Mario Bros or Megamans were at doing this.

I'm not sure I agree with the comparison to Tommy Wiseau. I feel Dickie is much more honest in his assessment of his works and doesn't need to keep things private or a mystery like Tommy does. If you want to say his games are as bad as The Room then that's your opinion, but that's where the comparisons stop for me.

I've played his wrestling games released on mobile. I'm a big fan of them and with time to kill play them all a good bit. Wrestling Revolution seems less "janky" than the 3D version and makes for a smoother experience, but the 3D game gets the job done. I'd also recommend Weekend Warriors if you want to play a goofy MMA game.

While I never expected to see an article on him here I'm certainly glad you put this up. He has one helluva story and reading about him makes me appreciate him more.

Hey, If he gives me 10K USD, he can be the owner of a wrestling company. I'm serious.

When I read this, I imagined the existence of a wrestling company that consisted of a stable of 40ish year old fellows that have been wrestling superfans every since they were kids, but that are all actually unfit, spandex wearing, wig wielding, facepaint wrestling warriors. They all had wrestling names that would have been indistinguishable from the jokey names in Wrestling Revolution 3D and that one of the key assets for the wrestling company was a storage room full of cheap, easily broken folding chairs, loads of brooms that fly apart when swung vigorously and crates made of balsa wood.

And that this imaginary wrestling company was exactly what MDickie had always been looking for....